State representative David Nagel made an announcement in February. After being elected for a second time as a Republican to represent Gilmanton, he's changing his party affiliation and will now be a Democrat.
Nagel sat down with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how he came to the decision after identifying as a lifelong Republican, and what he hopes to accomplish.
Transcript
Being listened to is very important to me, and it's empowering when people choose to listen to you. It makes all the difference in the world. It became quite apparent that the Republican leadership, anyways, was not willing to listen to me on really critical issues. I'm happy to listen to the party's message, but if my worldview doesn't match, I can't support it. And I don't like this playing politics. Like, 'I'll give you this deal here' and 'you'll give me that deal there,' and in the end we'll get something we want. But where does that leave the constituents that we're representing? We're working for them, not for the party, and not for us. And it was quite clear there was a difference of opinion on that.
The one thing I will also say is that the Democrats from the day I got here, listened to me. I mean, we started these discussions probably a year ago, like, 'Why are you over there? You can come over here.' and it's like, well, 'I've been a Republican my whole life. I got elected as one. Why shouldn't I stay here?' And the ethics of changing a party to something you weren't elected as was really troublesome to me. I think it was a combination of that and a couple of national issues that are going on now that basically reinforce that I'm not in the right place, and I needed a change.
Have you heard from constituents about this decision, and if so, what have they said?
To date, I've only received one negative letter. I've received so many letters from both sides of the aisle [saying ] we understand, we know how hard this was for you. It's just overwhelming to me to get that much positive feedback about such a traumatic, difficult thing. And then to get it from both sides of the aisle, that was crazy. I think there's a lot of Republicans that would like to do the same thing. And the question is, will the Democratic Party be better for me or not? I mean, I don't know, maybe. I know they listen to me. That's kind of empowering. But everybody's been great.
With your new party affiliation, what are the issues that you're hoping to get work done on?
Nothing's really changed for me personally. I think the Republicans are very good at looking at things from the 30,000 foot view. I think the Democrats are really good at looking at things from the ground level view, and I really think policy is best when you merge those two viewpoints. But we're not doing that. I think the Republicans really missed the boat a lot on the unintended consequences of bad policy, because they don't look at how their policies are going to affect people. And I know they're going to claim otherwise, but that's not true. The Medicaid issue is huge to me. The work requirement, superficially, sounds like a great idea. And superficially, I think it's a wonderful idea. The problem with it is how you put it in practice and how it affects people.
The other big issue to me personally, as a... grandchild [of immigrants], actually coming to this country is a really big deal. I do not support the Biden immigration policy at all, but at the same point, these people are here. We have a choice. But when you start using, in my opinion, unwarranted violence against American citizens as well as immigrants, that are human beings last I checked, that did not reflect well with me at all. And I will tell you the weirdest thing, the weirdest group of people that I was most concerned about how they would feel was my own family. And my younger brother wrote back to me. He goes, 'Congratulations, you're the Joe Manchin of the Nagel family.' And I said, 'That is the best compliment I will ever get because I really admire him for what he did.' I realize I'm a nobody. I'm not an important person. I'm one of 400 people in a very small state. But at the same point, if this can lead to something like empowerment of that group of people, then it will mostly be worthwhile.
